


Stories of the Second Self: Settling Darkness

by John_Steiner



Series: Alter Idem [100]
Category: Urban Fantasy - Fandom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-08
Updated: 2020-02-08
Packaged: 2021-02-27 21:47:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22612780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/John_Steiner/pseuds/John_Steiner
Summary: Lindsay and Austin's lives ended with Alter Idem, but their struggles continued. Despite being vampires, they were welcomed into Yasmin's commune in the still-abandoned northernmost district of Cincinnati. However, the all-natural rustic living proved too annoying, and so Lindsay and Austin leave. The pair find that calm society has returned, but with new rules and restrictions that vampires need to be mindful of, especially those not written in law books.
Series: Alter Idem [100]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1618813





	Stories of the Second Self: Settling Darkness

Nightfall was coming, and Lindsay stood by one of the stone structure's exits in anticipation. Austin was gathering her stuff along with his own. Others living in Yasmin's glyph-grown stone commune had left in the morning, but unlike most other days had yet to come back. Lindsay and Austin couldn't without protection or else they'd both burn in the sunlight.

Austin came down to the ground floor with both packs stuffed tight. "How's it lookin' out there?"

"Like about fifteen minutes," Lindsay answered her equally lifeless partner with solid black eyes and mouth full of razors like her own.

However, an intense thermal glow approached the mass of defoliated branches that obscured the doorway much less in winter. Through the last stretch of branches she saw Mason, the werewolf they hung out with for nearly three years.

Entering, Mason looked at the backpacks in Austin's hands. "You two gonna do night searches for Laura then?"

"What?" Austin said with an uncertain expression. "No, we're outta here."

"She's been missing since Friday, and you're not worried?" Mason asked him and Lindsay.

"We only stayed here, because the rest of the city was getting too crazy," Lindsay explained, "And because it's where the cops don't patrol. We heard about other vampires disappearing."

"Oh, so vampires getting nabbed is important," Mason surmised, "But anyone else is no big thing to you."

"Hey, we just don't wanna be next," Austin replied, "Besides, this is Laura we're talking about here."

"It's kinda her M.O. to just go off and no say anything," Lindsay added.

"Not like this," Mason countered, and quickly corrected. "Okay, the first time when she wound up here, but then she brought her fiance. Who, by the way, also hasn't turned up yet."

"Seeing a pattern there, Mason?" Lindsay prodded.

"I guess that's the difference between howlers and nightcrawlers," Mason said, equally comfortable with both derogatory terms without sounding bigoted. "When we need each other we stick together. How many times was I there for you?"

"It's different now." Lindsay dared lean out the door more to gauge the light outside. "Everybody's more or less adjusted to vampires. They even let us go out for blood, so long as it's voluntary."

"We appreciate what you did for us, big guy." Austin passed Lindsay's backpack to her, and then slapped Mason's upper arm in what almost looked heartfelt. "But, this whole back-to-nature gig wasn't really our thing. Most of the Fae and angels don't seem too chill with us."

The last rays of day faded, and Lindsay led the way outside without so much as a goodbye to Mason. She glanced back to see the howler hunk just stare at her and Austin in total disbelief, but faced ahead again, as she pushed aside bare branches to look for broken traces of sidewalk.

Yasmin, the human who practiced magic from the Gaia Cult, had forced huge cliff to rise from the ground in an abandoned northern part of Cincinnati, and collected followers who found the place.

However, that's when the rest of the city was still under martial law, with checkpoints everywhere. In the year that followed Lindsay and Austin's ending up here, their nighttime venturing led them to witness a societal comeback that they and others honestly didn't think would happen.

"You think we shoulda scrammed before now?" Austin asked, as he came up from behind after they found the roadside.

"I don't know," Lindsay answered, "Just that now we have enough money to get out own place. I found one in Reading that caters to Pentacastes. They have a couple windowless basement apartments for lease, and they don't do credit checks."

"Probably a crack house," Austin suggested, as they turned down to another road. "Though, that might not be so bad."

"Better than that," Lindsay said, "But not by much."

After a few blocks, Lindsay saw a car cruise by the intersection they reached. She noticed the streetlights were working. "Huh! They finally restored power this far."

"Makes me wonder how Yasmin's followers would react to this area being redeveloped," Austin said as he looked both ways.

When the light changed, Lindsay and Austin crossed the street. Block by block, Lindsay noticed an increased occurrence of houses where outdoor lights were on, and then she noticed something alarming.

"You see the windows on that house?" Lindsay pointed.

"That's UV light," Austin answered, "They got a strip running over every window and the door."

The further south the pair walked, the more often such security measures appeared. Crossing over into Reading, Lindsay noticed an actual phone booth. She'd seen movies and old photos where phone booths were pretty much everywhere.

"What?" Austin asked, seeing what had her attention. "So, it's a phone booth. They probably put them back for calling out of state."

"Except there's no phone in it," Lindsay observed, and approached the booth. "It's got a charging station."

"Well, that's cool," Austin marveled at the interior modifications. "I'll bet they don't even make you pay for the juice."

"Shit," Lindsay heard someone call out from afar.

Readily spotting the body heat where the voice originated, Lindsay noticed a woman halfway down the block who looked human. They appeared to have been heading for the booth, but had frozen on seeing her and Austin. Then, she immediately turned and briskly walked the other way toward yet another booth.

"These things are everywhere," Austin noted.

The living woman got into the distant booth and closed it. Lindsay saw that same glow of UV light over the door. "Oh, I get it. It's so people can have their little fucking safe space at night."

"Let's just keep going," Austin suggested, taking Lindsay's upper arm.

They strode down the street toward the second booth, as that's where they'd been heading anyway. Yet, even within ten yards of the phone booth Lindsay could feel the UV light as if she stood within a few feet of a heat lamp. Checking her hands, Lindsay fretted that they might slow-cook.

Austin pulled Lindsay out into the street, so they could walk past the booth without pain. She stared at the living woman, who warily eyed her and Austin in turn. Lindsay noticed that the woman's phone was set into the charging station, and the woman herself seemed to relax when the vampire pair passed the booth.

The woman shrugged and mouthed to them. 'Sorry.'

"You know, I went down to that underground chamber once," Austin mentioned, "Kept wondering what the hell Walter was up to when he snuck off that way. Did you know there's a bunch of plants growing down there?"

"How?" Lindsay doubted. "There's no sunlight."

"There's gotta be," Austin insisted, "Either that or Yasmin's got spells for that also. If that shit gets around we won't be safe anytime."

"It's no different than all the UVC lights people are getting," Lindsay argued.

About an hour later, Lindsay reached the familiar street to the apartment complex. Unlike before Alter Idem, the management office was open all day and night, and so she and Austin were able to meet someone and inquire about a lease. While there wasn't a credit check, as she described to Austin, they did have to file a bunch of other forms.

Lindsay, had already toured the apartment she picked out. The person working the office night shift was also a vampire, and mentioned to them the need to get a fiduciary to help formalize the incorporation of their financial status.

Having been homeless for three years straight, many of these details were new to Lindsay, but she'd been hearing about it in passing from other people, living and undead. Up to now, the jobs she and Austin worked were all under the table and paid in cash.

Cash was how they handled their first rent, then Lindsay and Austin followed the office worker to their apartment. There were six buildings, three on either side of a single parking lot, with all the visible apartment fronts facing each other. However, they were lead around the back of their building to find a horizontal door.

The apartment worker unlocked and opened that to reveal the stairs heading down to a vertical door, and then they handed over keys to Lindsay and Austin. "It's all yours now."

Lindsay took her key without comment and headed down. Unlocking the door the lock was unusually loud and rather hefty-sounding. Austin came down behind her, and threw a quizzical expression her way.

However, inside was what Lindsay recalled during the tour, most importantly, no windows whatsoever. It didn't technically violate fire code, she was told, because the complex wasn't allowed to lease them to living people.

Closing the door, she took off her pack back in the dark and went for the bedroom. She and Austin unloaded their stuff onto the bed and started figuring out where they were going to put it all away.

"Not bad," Austin remarked when they were done, and then laid down on the bed lacing his fingers behind his head. "From the look of it, they left the thermostat at about fifty."

"And we have lights, if...," Lindsay made a wry face, "you know, we decide to have guests."

"Or some fuckin' No-Knock police raid," Austin cracked.

Just that moment there came a knock at their door. Lindsay and Austin exchanged bewildered looks before going back to the entrance.

There, Lindsay paused with her hand on the knob. "It's probably just them saying they forgot something."

However, when she opened the door the unusually bright thermal glare came from a long-haired and bearded werewolf wearing a plaid shirt and jeans. Next to him was a raven-haired woman in a skin-tight dress and small purse with a glow matching that of the air and walls around her, letting Lindsay know she was a vampire.

"Uhh," Lindsay voiced with confusion. "Hi?"

"You're Lindsay," the woman stated and came in unbidden.

"Excuse you," Lindsay said from disbelief.

The lumberjack-looking guy stayed outside and closed the door.

"And the lover boy, Austin," the woman added, placing a hand in her purse.

"You don't just come in...," Austin said before being cut off.

The strange woman slipped out a small light, which she turned on toward the floor. Despite also being a vampire, she had no qualms about toting a UVC light. "So, looking for Walter Kovich, huh?"

"Fuck that guy," Austin scoffed, "We don't give a shit about him or his fiance."

"That's good," the woman said, "Forthright. It'll save you a lot of trouble. What about you, Lindsay?"

"Who are you?" Lindsay asked, holding her arms out.

"Ohh, that's right," the woman responded in a way Lindsay thought was pretense of remembering. "You don't know the rules of Silverton."

"I've never been in Silverton," Lindsay replied, "So, again, who are you?"

"Someone you don't want make repeat her questions," the vampire woman answered, her face turning even more serious and cold.

Lindsay eyed the UVC light beam, realizing that the woman waved it particularly close to her own exposed calf, and decided she wasn't going to try to out-tough this chick. "We're not out to find either of them. We just decided to leave that commune. They're a little too hipster for my tastes."

"Leave where?" the woman demanded.

"It's this stone-rise kind of thing," Austin easily volunteered, "It's part of this cliff just stickin' out of the ground in the abandoned northern blocks."

"A cliff?" the woman repeated with doubt all over her face. "In Ohio?"

"It's true," Lindsay affirmed, "There's this human chick, Yasmin. She's apparently big on a bunch of magic, and used these charmed carvings, or some shit to get the stone to grow or whatever. She's been greening up the whole place."

"Also, she has this cavern under it that's filled with plants that're still alive," Austin added. "I don't know how she does that, 'cause I haven't seen light down there."

"Why did you leave?" the woman inquired on.

"Things seemed to be getting...," Lindsay was reluctant to use the word, "well, I guess normal. People don't freak out on us so much, and the lynch mob shit's died down, so I decided I like having a real place to stay with electricity and other stuff."

An expression of concession manifested on the woman's face as she nodded to that idea and, more importantly, turned off the UVC light. "If you weren't one of us I'd doubt your sincerity."

"Why'd you think we were looking for Walter?" Austin asked.

Inwardly, Lindsay cringed, but she also was curious. "Did he do something to get in trouble with the cops?"

"Cops?" the woman replied, "No. He upset someone more important than that. Which reminds me. Should you end up in Silverton there are some rules you need to acquaint yourselves with."

"We weren't actually looking for trouble," Austin assured.

"All the same, these are they," the woman began, and leveled a finger at them, "You will not Open Feed. There will be no vandalism or robbery-- or more grievous errors."

"We weren't planning to anyway," Lindsay said, trading uncertain faces with Austin, before adding, "And we're definitely not into that kind of organization," and then Lindsay raised her hands, "Whichever kind you're not mentioning and we didn't hear about."

"We take real estate values very seriously in Silverton," the woman explained with an air more dangerous than would come from a home owners association or beautification committee. "Do you both understand?"

"Sure," Austin eagerly agreed with shrug.

"Yeah," Lindsay echoed and nodded. "We won't be a problem."

"Good," the woman accepted, and said nothing more as she left.

Once the door closed Lindsay heard her ascend the steps with her werewolf partner.

"The fuck was that about?" Austin blurted in bewilderment.

"I think she's part of some mafia or something," Lindsay suggested, herself as unsettled as Austin appeared to be. "Let's just not go to Silverton unless we really have to."

"I'm fine with that," Austin replied, "A vampire who carries a UV light is more than I wanna deal with."


End file.
